


Strange Currencies

by welltimedsmiles



Category: Veronica Mars - Fandom
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-03-12
Updated: 2006-03-12
Packaged: 2017-10-24 00:26:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/256782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/welltimedsmiles/pseuds/welltimedsmiles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She likes to believe love is more than mutual dysfunction dressed up so people can make it through the day with one another.  [9,950 words]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strange Currencies

Logan spends a lot of time in Mexico at first. He loves the way he can fake freedom and painlessness with a bottle of tequila. The sun dries the salt water on his skin and he feels cracked and dirty most of the time. He doesn’t care. The waves are awesome, the drugs are cheap, and if people know who he is, they don’t give a shit. At first, it’s like a snatch and drug-soaked holiday. Soon the cash dries up, and his dad's credit cards that he had so easily grabbed on his way out of Neptune are charged to the hilt or frozen. Thank you, court case.

The case brought questions, lawyers, and the media. All of it is bullshit. He doesn’t want any part of the entire thing, but he finds himself tuning into Court TV to watch the drama unfold. He gets high and watches his life dance across the TV screen. They play parts of a tape and he hears Lilly moan his dad’s name. The figures on his TV are just blobs pixilated out; but he sees her toes, hears her voice. He hates lawyers and the beautiful excuses and lies they spin in a desperate attempt to dig Aaron Echolls out of murder and underage sex videos. They paint Lilly as an evil whore that drove his dad to insanity, and he dreams about punching the lawyers out on TV.

  
He’s got lawyers too; he sits on payphones in the middle of Texas diners yelling at them as grizzled truckers - several missing teeth shy of being a part of _Deliverance: the Return of the Banjo Playing Freaks_ \- stare at him. It takes some time, but all his phone calls and badgering prove useful and unknot all those crazy strings around his inheritance. He doesn’t so much as stick his toe over the California border for years.

He winds his way through the lower forty-eight on a binge that should make the great artists of self-destruction that came before him proud. He’s in New York the day his dad is sentenced, sitting in a greasy spoon with a girl he met the night before, both of them bleary-eyed, coked out of their minds. When Aaron Echolls gets the death penalty, Logan stands on the table, knocking flat soda pop all over his date, and cheers.

  


*****

  
Veronica doesn’t have time for nostalgia trips. She’s got – maybe - one more year before she can proudly hold her state college diploma in her hand. Four days a week, she makes the drive to the outskirts of San Diego where she runs about campus in a coffee-fueled haze. In the afternoon and on Friday mornings, she works in one of Neptune’s larger office buildings as an assistant. She’s learned to get comfortable in cheap Payless heels and to conceal her cleavage from drooling idiot men that call her honey when she brings them coffee. She still wields a camera for her dad at night, studying Sociology and Family Psych while catching slime balls sleeping around on their cozy little families.

She’s learned not to be nostalgic. There are no pictures in her wallet, and her desk contains only a calendar and a blue plastic pencil cup. This is why when she realizes it’s Logan’s birthday, she nearly misses her turn. It’s a random memory, the sort of thing that floats into her brain only as the morning DJ reads off the day's forecast. She sits in traffic and watches rain streak across the windows and the kick she feels in her stomach is reminder enough about why she doesn’t think about the past.

She doesn’t wonder where he is enough to look for him, not enough to cut them both back open with gaping wounds and sadness. Yet, there’s still a bare, quiet thing that haunts her with questions and sort-of regrets. Sometimes, late at night when she’s feeling particularly masochistic, she remembers the way his hair felt between her fingers and the way his tongue moved across her neck and how he sounded when he whispered to her.

She's been seeing someone, several someones, in fact. Nice guys. Bad guys. Guys her dad threatened to do bodily harm to. Guys that Wallace would give the evil eye to whenever they came to pick her up.

“You are the least threatening sort of step-brother ever.”

“Hey, if someone messes with you…”

“You’ll sic Back-up on them?”

They sit and talk on the phone. He’s in L.A. at a small school that gave him a basketball scholarship. When Wallace went off to college, Alicia officially moved in and was soon Mrs. Alicia Fennel-Mars. She tells Wallace things now. Mostly just things about boyfriends and the surface of what she’s thinking. It isn’t like it was with Lilly, where it was all open and Veronica was the girl that just spilled out with nothing to hide.

She doesn’t tell him how sometimes she wonders if she should have looked harder, or at all really. If he’s even _alive_ …

Of course Logan’s alive; Logan doesn’t actually die. He’s just entropy, moving toward destruction with every breath he takes. She’s certain that if Logan was dead, she’d know. Logan wouldn’t even do his own death quietly.

  


*****

  
He’s made his way to London. The girls, the drugs, the dancing, the music, everything here seems so much better at the moment. He sits in a hotel room dropping acid and screwing local school girls with big tits. His dad’s sentence is up for appeal. A handful of people looking very uncomfortable show up to be character witnesses for him. They spin a fairytale told by Court TV for Logan’s pleasure.

“He loved his family so much.”

Logan laughs and throws a bottle through the television. When flames spark from the broken set, Logan pours another bottle on it and watches the room light up. Hotel sprinklers go off, soaking him, and when security comes in and tries to drag him out, Logan punches one of them in the jaw; blood spatters across the room and mixes with the bits of soot and water staining his white t-shirt.

The next morning, Logan shares space on the front page of the tabloids with his father. One reads, “Like Father, Like Son?”

Logan buys that one and keeps it in his bag as he boards the plane back to the States. In the toilet, he stares at the headlines and vomits until a spider web of red has formed in his eyes.

His knees are weak and he’s drunk on tiny bottles of Jack; he stumbles into the airport and is blinded by camera lights and his own bleary vision. There’s a microphone in his face and Logan just reacts. In a swift and uncoordinated motion, he grabs the microphone from the reporter, and by the time airport security gets to him, Logan’s kicking the guy.

  


*****

  
Veronica sees exactly where Logan is when she stops at the Jittery Joe's between work and class the next day.

“Echolls Men At It Again!” A picture of an enraged Logan accompanies his second mug shot in almost as many days.

At dinner, she, Alicia, and Dad see a video of the event on the news. Neither one says anything to her. Her dad just stops for a second with his tuna casserole half-way into his mouth staring at her.

”What?” she snaps sharply, noticing his stare as half a glob of food falls from his fork.

“Nothing just…. Nothing.” He shakes his head and jumps up from the table, digging through the cabinets for some random object.

She spends the night not thinking about him again. She wishes she’d stop not doing that. The circles under her eyes would be smaller and she’d feel a little less groggy when she answers phones the next morning.

She doesn’t have room in her life for this. There’s no time between trying to finish school and working two jobs to go see him for just the State-allowed one hour visitation in County Jail. Rationalizing all this doesn’t make her feel any better and she still sleeps seeing his picture in the paper.

  


*****

  
After the thing with the journalists and spending time in jail, he hooks up with Weevil. Weevil’s more than happy to watch the little rich boy work for him, and well, Weevil’s easy enough to deal with.

He weaves himself in and out of Southern California. Spends some time in L.A. moving drugs for some guys Weevil knows. He gets bored standing around and selling to stupid sorority girls and their boyfriends.

“Why are you mocking them? You are them.” Weevil laughs and passes him the blunt.

Logan starts to say, ‘Not anymore.’ But that’s hollow and strange. He hates to admit that he’s still this mysterious ‘them’ that Weevil talks about, he’s still Logan Echolls and there’s a sadness that, as much as he hates large parts of that, he doesn’t want to be anyone else.

Logan is summoned by a team of private detectives working for his father’s lawyers; this is Logan’s grand return.

Except it lacks in grandiosity; this is him slinking back into town on a bus carrying a worn duffle and mending an arm after one frat boy decided that Logan’s hand really shouldn’t have been buried inside his girlfriend’s thighs. This is just another redefinition. Once upon a time, Logan didn’t ride buses except for field trips and he didn’t share blunts with Eli Navarro. He’s a man in constant redefinition.

“What are you gonna do back in town?” Weevil looked at him warily.

Logan started to speak and paused for a moment, fantasy and options flew through his mind. He could stay around; Weevil would find something for him to do. But maybe the lawyers will finally have good news for him and he can be himself again, put all the pieces back together and stop being the little broken prince. For a moment he has a hot girlfriend, a fucking awesome car, and is the ruler of Neptune.

Things change, hard. Then again, maybe Logan never was Neptune’s prince, maybe he always was Duncan’s excuse and Lilly’s pet. In faded memories it seems like his life had to be more than that, but time and drugs and everything else has washed that away, and now there are only blood-tinged daydreams. Lilly’s death, Veronica, all of it seems to twist together. Veronica was never a replacement for Lilly, never. She was something else; he had loved Lilly desperately and entirely. The difference, where things really split, beyond the obviousness of Lilly and Veronica existing at opposites ends of the spectrum, complete polarity to the other, is that he thought Veronica could love him back.

“Not going near any bitchy little blondes with all their existential angst and bullshit excuses. Fuck her,” Logan spat the words out, and fuck, he meant it.

Weevil nodded and said nothing.

Veronica is a near-constant fixation in his head. At first, he always assumed she would find him, that one day there’d be a loud banging on whatever door he was crashed behind and on the other side would be her. Her arms would be crossed and she’d roll her eyes at the depths of the skank-filled depravity he’d be living in. He’d grab his coat and they’d ride their way back to Neptune. Somewhere along the way, she’d apologize for not trusting him and somewhere outside of Reno they’d pull over and fuck in the middle of the desert. He feels warm thinking of her skin on his, the two of them on the side of the road with the top down and late afternoon sun scorching on their skin.

No matter what the definition of Logan Echolls is these days, the constant is a weakness, something that burns through him. He still wakes up in cold sweats, clutching the edges of his blanket like a child. He reaches out to whatever is there, something with traction to hold him steady.

He leaves the world behind as he tries to fall off to sleep at the Neptune Grande. The bar’s open until midnight and Logan hasn’t been to sleep without a drink in years. He doesn’t make it to the bar. When he passes the lobby, he is kicked in the stomach. Memories flood; the color of the carpet, the same old scent of the room, and he's there. He’s just a ghost haunting all the things he used to be.

He nearly hits some people on his way to her house. The rental car smells of stale freshener and even more stale coffee. Just another thing for him to discard when done with or whatever. The lights are still on and there’s a flicker of a TV through the window of the apartment. He sleeps in the car that night. In the distance a fading street light occasionally wakes him and he hears the all too immediate noises of life happening in Veronica’s apartment complex. Doors slam, people yell, cars peel off with a screech and others slide in as the sun eases up in a cloudy morning sky.

  


*****

  
It’s early when Veronica heads out the door for work, carrying her bag of books and a change of clothes with her. Low-heeled shoes she hates clicking on the pavement in the early morning silence. As soon as she leaves from the stairs and looks to her car, she notices the strange white car next to it.

She sees the movement inside and her chest tightens. When the door opens and it’s him, she bolts to her car. She’s never pretended something isn’t there so hard.

“Veronica…” his voice’s hoarse, quiet. He doesn’t really look at her, just a glance before turning his head, face hidden behind unwashed, tangled hair. The way he looks at her with hooded-eyes, he’s all soft angles, delicate and damaged; something that once cut her to the bone now worn-down and broken.

  
“Logan.” She is not broken or soft, she is calm and assured, as if this is just some random former acquaintance. Just another person from another life she used to know. She leans against the car and honestly, the times she allowed herself to imagine seeing him again, she always thought it would be different. It would be heavier and maybe there was background music or something.

Instead, she just feels tired.

Everything seems to hang there for hours, Veronica frozen in sudden exhaustion. She starts walking toward him when he says,

“I should go…” and gets back into the car. His hand never moves to the ignition though and finally Veronica pulls the door open and lands a kiss on his forehead. Logan follows her lead and pulls himself out.

Her body shudders as he runs a bandage-covered hand, fingertips peeking out from beneath brown cloth, down her arm. There’s a clang as his keys fall to the floor, and he’s grasping for her, desperately moving from her arms, to her stomach, free hand fingering the edges of her bra, under her blouse. She presses him into the car frame, his legs still mostly in the driver’s seat. Her hands move quickly over his back, taking in the warmth of his body. They’re tangled confusion and hungry movements. He just goes along with her, just letting her get further and further into this. This. Oh _fuck_ , this, whatever this is.

 _This_ where Logan’s slowly moving his hands over her, and even with these awkward long-lost motions it feels like hunger and need. It feels good. She doesn’t understand why. Logan’s just a boy, a man. There are prettier men, there are far nicer men, and more importantly, more than anything, there are men that are not Logan Echolls and the train wreck he brings behind him. She’s got her fingers through his hair, how many days of salt-water smell and sand she’s pulling out in her nails she doesn’t want to know, and even as her teeth pull gently on his lips she knows she has to stop.

She pulls away and he reaches out. His fingers sliding off her arms as she tears away. It’s harsh and cold away from him, the breeze blowing against the sweat and spit on her face feels cool and dirty.

On the way to work, she turns the radio up and sings along to the Tom Petty that crackles out from the Classic Rock AM station. The music cracks in and out as she moves down the freeway. She belts out, “Everybody's had to fight to be free, You see you don't have to live like a refugee,” her voice loud and clear. She does the same with the next song and the next; singing over the cracks in transmission and making up the words she doesn’t know. She’s feeling better by the time she makes her stop for coffee, but it will be lunch before she stops feeling his hands moving across her skin.

  


*****

  
Lawyer meetings in hotel restaurants, there’s something so _California_ about it. No offices or stiff suits, instead it’s his sister's desire to be seen out and about so Logan obliges and they meet in the bar and grill portion of the Neptune Grande. He orders his third lunchtime rum and coke as the lawyers continue to pore over papers. Trina sits, sunglasses still on, glaring at him from across the table. He hates this. He’s down with the fact that he prettied himself up and is keeping his mouth shut for this. His lips are sealed and his face is clean shaven if it means getting at dear old Dad’s currently unfrozen and unused assets. What’s left after the Kane’s wrongful death suit, anyway.

Duncan. Logan likes to try and write Duncan off as just another thing he left behind in the life he used to have. It’s easier than trying to figure out how to repair a broken friendship; easier than trying to figure out how to apologize for the sins of other people, and easier than trying to pretend to feel bad about something you can’t force yourself to have regret over. Denial is easier and Logan’s always been about what’s easy. Frustration overtakes him as these thoughts run through his head and he slams his drink down on the table hard, liquid sloshes out the sides leaving dots all over the edge of the table.

Trina wipes her hand off with disgust,

“Isn’t it a little early in the day to be drinking so much? Just like your dear old mom, huh?” and she tilts her head in that annoying faux perky way and sips on her diet coke.

“Isn’t it a little early in the day for you to be such a bitch?” Logan slides back into his chair, waving a hand to get the waiter’s attention. This meeting is sucking far harder than he could have possibly imagined it would.

“You are seriously off your game, Logan. I mean, really, a bitch? That’s the best you can do?”

The lawyer just sighs and closes one of the folders with smack on the table.

“Your dad would also like visits with both of you,” He says quickly, eyebrows furrowed together as he glances back and forth between Trina and Logan.

Trina simply nods again with that eager smile plastered across her face. Logan snorts.

“What the hell? Like one visit? Or…” Not that Logan wants even that anyway, but he briefly debates how much a brief fifteen-minute press moment with his fucking father is worth to him.

“He says,” the lawyer pauses to clear his throat and reads from the documents in front of him, “regular contact with both of his children including visits, ability to make phone calls, and send mail.”

“And if we don’t want to do that? Like, any of it?” Logan knows what the answer is, but he wants to hear the lawyer be the messenger for his father and his continuing crimes of emotional manipulation and power-tripping.

“Then the money continues to stay frozen or will go into a trust or charity fund of some sort.” The lawyer blinks and again clears his throat, shifting uncomfortably in his chair.

“Fuck that.” Logan downs the rest of drink and kicks his chair over on his way out.

Trina will go visit daddy dearest, get her picture plastered on in the newspapers being the poor dutiful daughter of Aaron Echolls. Her only comment will be what a trial it is supporting their very disturbed but loving father by herself during this ordeal.

Trina will do all of this because Trina is evil. She’s the sort of thing that Logan wants to scrape off his shoes and God, how much DNA do they share? He twitches a little, thinking there’s a shred of anything like her in him. Sometimes he sees his father in himself, when he’s drunk or in a fight, the motion of his arm mid-swing will jar him and it aches.

When he was ten, he thought test-tube babies were lucky. He thought they came in a lab and didn’t have a family. They just came into the world with all the greatness that entails, but without dragging themselves through the process of having relatives and people that were socially bound to claim they love you. Thankfully, he’s his mother’s son and he has almost learned how to stay drunk and high enough that you don’t think about those things much.

As he slams the door to his room, he briefly realizes the enormity of what he just let slide through is hands. These ties are cut, bonds are severed, and the cash flow forever banned. There’s a moment of panic, terror of the complete unknown ripping through his skin. He’s flying free with no safety net beneath him.

  


*****

  
Veronica doesn’t intend to end up standing in the lobby of the Neptune Grande, but here she is. She just feels him out, knows that if Logan’s in town, this is where he’ll be. He meets her downstairs, wrapped in a complimentary white terry cloth robe that includes an ever-tasteful loopy NG monogrammed on the back. His hair sticks out at odd angles, partially covering the left side of his face. She follows him wordlessly into the elevator and down the long burgundy carpeted hallway. People come and go past them and Veronica awkwardly attempts polite smiles and to avoid eye contact.

He opens the door to the room and Veronica flinches, “My God, Logan, how long have you been here?” The room is littered with fast food bags, room service trays, assorted bottles, and drug paraphernalia. “Also, did you go all Special Ed, because, as dumb as the police in this town might be? Illegal!” Veronica seals up the small bag of coke and throws it and his bong into the bottom of the closet with a towel over them.

He shrugs, “I don’t let the cleaning ladies in. Seriously, you give these people enough money and they don’t care what you do in here.” He throws himself back on the bed and with a swipe of his arm, sends a bag of chips flying. He pats the rumpled bed, inviting her in.

She sits down next to him, carefully placing her bag on the floor. He turns up the television. An old episode of _Law & Order_ blares on as Logan leans over to the dresser and pulls out a bent carton of cigarettes.

He offers her one and Veronica starts to turn her nose up,

“Oh come on, if you’re gonna come into the den of sin itself, why not at least come out with a slightly higher risk of cancer and birth defects for your future unborn children?” She takes it and slides the cigarette carefully between her lips. The way he watches her, hooded amused eyes peeking out from beneath his hair sends a shiver down her spine.

“This is not a den of sin. A den of immaturity and filth perhaps, but a debauchery-filled den straight out of a Motley Crue video, it isn’t.”

“Nice to see someone is keeping up with her _Behind the Music_.”

“VH1 makes TV fun and educational!” She takes a quick drag from the cigarette and coughs just a bit as she exhales. Logan places the brown glass hotel ashtray between them, a line of demarcation between their respective battle fields.

“How are you?” he asks, turning the volume on the TV down ever so slightly.

“Fine.”

“Five years of fine. Wow, that’s exciting. Are you also okay and good? Glad I blew into town to get in on your fast-paced existence.”

“So you came back to mock me?” Logan just shrugs, the robe hanging loosely on him, falling down from his shoulders. “Well I do have to say, you sure know how to make a girl feel special, Logan.”

“I’m told I have a talent for making people feel…special.” The last word rolls of his tongue, full of sin and sarcasm.

“I doubt you could ever make _me_ feel special," she spits back at him, not even aware until the words are out how much bitterness and resentment are tumbling out of her.

“And you remain a heartless fucking bitch, Veronica.”

With this she reaches for her bag on the floor, and she’s almost off the bed when he grabs her by the arm. They both jump at this sudden motion, Logan staring at his hand on Veronica’s arm, Veronica staring at him.

“I’m here, okay? I just wanted to... I needed to see you, Veronica.”

She wants there to be less desperation in his voice, all his sarcasm and sadness fall away when he says her name and she hates him for that. She hates that even with all he’s done, he’s allowed the luxury of crumbling in front of her. She’s never naked for anyone.

“Well see, here I am!” she smiles and flips her hair and what does he want from her? Okay sure, she imagined she might try and apologize to him, what with the distrust and everything. But fuck, how is she supposed to climb that mountain? How can she say she’s sorry when she knows that she did what she thought was right?

He pulls her closer to him, she slides in from the edge of the bed and for a moment there’s just them, cigarette smoke, and Ben Stone trying to put a bad guy away.

  


*****

  
All Logan learned of Zen he got from listening to his dad’s bullshit spiritual babbling. It was always about how there was never a past or a future. Only this exact moment and when that’s over, it is the next exact moment that is your reality. Everything else is meaningless. He has no idea if this is what it’s all about, but he likes the notion.

He likes that he can hold Veronica, his face buried into her hair in post-coital exhaustion and it’s just that thing; every moment of his reality is shaped by her skin, her breath, whatever she’s doing. If she’d let him, he’d wrap himself around her and be absorbed in her orbit. He thinks this could be enough for him. He’d just be Veronica’s and that would be better.

She rolls over and looks at him, her hair sticks up on the side she was sleeping on, the pillow creases have left marks across her cheek and she growls as she stretches. He prays to every God he doesn’t give a fuck about he won’t see regret in her eyes.

If it’s there, she hides it well and Logan knows she can. She can bury things so far down even she doesn’t think they exist, he can never read her and he desperately wants to devote his life to studying her. He’d make a Rosetta Stone and sell it to all the guys that could make her infinitely happier.

“I’ve got work and then class so, yeah… I need to split,” she says quickly as she pulls her sneakers on and tightens the laces with a sharp pull.

“I’ll be here a while," he says, picking up her bag from the other side of the bed. She nods simply and is gone in a haze of confusion.

He’s not leaving this room. Just in case.

  


*****

  
Veronica’s spent the past two nights with him. She comes in and there’s perfunctory small talk, maybe some dinner. Last night was Chinese food and watching _The Simpsons_. They talk around things to each other, always dancing carefully around the emotional landmines that are scattered across the room.

Tonight she peels off her sweater, soaked from the rain and he greets her, pulling his shirt over his head, a pair of dirty jeans hanging from his hips. Fresh from the shower he shakes his hair, and as he pulls her in, she can’t help but let her fingers move through it.

They’re all friction, moving hard against each other. Hot breath against her neck, bodies making war because their owners refuse to fight their battles any other way. He moves slowly, always taking his time as his lips move slowly down her stomach, teeth making blunt marks across her hips as he presses a little too hard, a little too eager. They gasp and moan in rhythm to the TV theme music and as Veronica softly moans into Logan’s ear, the music to _Friends_ pops on.

“I’m sure this is how you always imagined the most romantic of your evenings, isn’t it?” he asks, rolling over. With a carefully-practiced toss, he throws the condom in the bedside garbage pail.

“Oh sure, every girl dreams of having sex to 90’s sitcoms in a room that looks like ...” Veronica pushes herself up from the bed and peers around. “Like someone finally allowed the cleaning ladies in. I’m impressed.”

“Yeah, I saw a plague rat earlier today and thought it might be time to get the first five or six layers of crust peeled off.” She gives him a hesitant half-smile, she’s all self-conscious now. Measuring her actions; not like during sex when it’s all just pure reaction and instinct.

He has delusions that things like sex are more honest that way.

Veronica pulls the sheets around her as she makes her way to the bathroom. Naked, she’s beautiful in the glow of the small bathroom light and the television. He craves this, this vision of her caught somewhere in post-fuck bliss, half-lit and silent. She’s just beauty and strength and all the other things are hidden with tricks of memory.

She slides back into the bed, pulling a t-shirt over her head.

“When are you leaving?” she asks, picking up the television remote.

“Whatever money’s left I’m not getting since I refuse to play Aaron’s faithful son." He puts his hand over his chest and looks earnest as a smile creeps across his face. Then he shrugs, "I should have enough cash for the moment until I can do something else.”

“You could stick around.” She won’t look at him, intent on flipping through the channels on the cable TV guide. He laughs.

“I’m serious. Get a job like the rest of the population.”

“You’re serious?”

“Wow, your listening skills suck, don’t they?”

“I’m just… amused is all.” He lights a cigarette and offers it to her. She takes a slow drag from it and finally looks at him.

“You’ve got to have gone through your mom’s money by now, so what are you going to do?”

“Stuff?” He shrugs.

“That’s mature.”

“Let’s not do this.” He waves his hand dismissively at her, and as he passes the cigarette back, it’s with such force that ashes fly and hit the sheets. They jump, trying to ensure they don’t end up sending the hotel down in flames.

“Fine, I’ve got to go anyway. I’ve got a final to study for and I have to be to the office on time in the morning. I can’t keep doing _this_.” She sighs as she digs around the floor for her jeans.

“Would you notice… if I?” he stops himself as he sees the look of confusion and dread on her face.

“If you?”

God, why does she have to play dumb? Why does she have to smile so pretty as he comes apart at the seams?

“If I wasn’t here. If I left.”

“Again,” she finishes bluntly.

“Yeah.”

She’s still standing with one pant leg on, crouched half over, her head up looking at him through her bangs and frozen still.

“You know how you didn’t want to do this? Whatever this was when you said that? Well this just became any of this. Let’s just... pretend you never came to _my_ house and slept outside like a creepy stalker and I’ll pretend a lot of things. Okay? Good.”

She nearly falls backward pulling her pants back on and if she pulls any harder on the laces to her shoes, the strings will break.

The door slams behind her.

Fuck you, Veronica Mars. Fuck you.

  


*****

  
She knows what he wanted from her. Some heartfelt apology for… something. As if she could patch his life back together with magic words and a fuck. No matter how sorry she is that she didn’t trust him, Lilly is still dead and his dad is still a murderer. No matter how Veronica explains not looking for him, he’s still an orphan and a criminal. No matter how messed up Logan is, Veronica has a hard time being sorry for a lot of these things. She’s caught somewhere between wanting to fix Logan and not wanting to tear herself up in the process.

She goes back that afternoon to find the room locked, no answer at the door and no little door hanger with Logan’s “Enter This Room and I’ll Beat The Shit Out of You” scrawled over the “Please Do Not Disturb.”

She’s in her car before she decides to go back and ask. She lies to herself and thinks, ‘it never hurts to ask.’ A little extra knowledge never hurt anyone and all that.

“The state of California and the Neptune Grande both frown on credit card fraud. Your friend is in police custody, ma’am. Again.” The clerk doesn’t look away from his computer screen and the ‘ma’am’ drips from his mouth like he’s calling her a disease. She hates this town.

She hates Logan Echolls.

Even more than that, she hates the fairytale she let herself buy. These few days with Logan where everything sat in stasis and they just pretended history never happened.

She leaves a message on Cliff’s cell phone; dad and Alicia are out to dinner, thus draining her of easy only minimally judgmental people from which to fish legal advice from. She’s thankful when she opens the door to find Wallace sprawled across the couch, a bag of Cheetos on the floor next to a large glass half-filled with red Kool-Aid.

“Home for the weekend?” she asks, digging through the refrigerator. “And damn it Wallace, you have to refill the Kool-Aid when you empty it out!”

“Yeah, I can’t take one more weekend of listening to my country boy roommate try to sing Kid Rock at the top of his lungs. Have I mentioned how much I hate football players, Veronica? Cause I really, really do.” He looks up at her desperately as she stands in front of the television, empty red-stained container in hand.

He pushes himself off the couch with a sigh and playfully jerks the container from her hand. Veronica throws herself into the couch, pushing her shoes off onto the floor as her legs dangle over the arm of the couch. She flips the channels, finally settling on old Nicktoon reruns.

Wallace hands her a tall glass as he throws himself down on the couch next to her, grumbling as he notices her change from random afternoon action movie to some old cartoons.

“Man, you look rough.” He takes a large handful of Cheetos and shoves them in his mouth.

Veronica makes a face and looks at him, thankful that Wallace is Wallace and there for her to sort herself out to.

“Girly drama?” Wallace groans, rolling over so his face is buried in the worn beige couch cushions.

“Hey, my drama is gruff and masculine! Manly like a truck driver eating barbeque at a rodeo.”

“Why’d you have to mention rodeos? I can hear the bad music in my head, Veronica. Make the pain stop.” She crawls over and pulls the pillow away from his face, her eyes big, bottom lip stuck out.

Wallace peeks out with a small grin.

“So, Logan came back,” Veronica blurts, sliding down the couch and sitting Indian-style in front of him.

“And?”

“He’s in jail. And we’ve been together, well sort of for the past, like, four days.” Her words tumble out and it isn’t that she owes anyone a confession. She’s got no sins to repent for in this, and yet she feels like she’s got something she needs to make right.

“What’s he in jail for?” Wallace throws a few more Cheetos into his mouth, orange powder making a trail around his t-shirt to his mouth.

“Credit card fraud, or, well, that’s what the desk clerk at the hotel managed to tell me between sneers,” Veronica sighs, leaning and stealing a Cheeto from Wallace’s hand. He rolls his yes.

“He’s not your problem.” Wallace reminds her.

“No, he’s not, what kind of lame-ass martyr do you think I am? But he’s somebody’s problem. Or he should have been somebody’s problem. I don’t know.” She takes the bag away from him suddenly, the nearly empty plastic crinkling loudly.

“I think you’re the kind of lame-ass martyr that asked me about this because you want validation? Sometimes I miss when you didn’t tell me things.”

“That was so below the belt.” Veronica winces and holds her stomach.

“Hey! I’m just playing like Dr. Phil. You didn’t want advice, you just wanted someone to tell you… okay, I’m not actually sure what you wanted me to tell you.” Wallace frowns, staring at Veronica.

“How about that you know it would be totally cool for me to pretend I had no idea who Logan is and to go skipping merrily along my way singing a happy song to myself while cartoon animals buzz around me?”

“That’s what you want to do?”

“Uh yeah, who doesn’t love happy cartoon animals?”

“I’m just trying to point out that there are some cartoon characters that have animals follow them and then there are some that go screaming through the forest to save the ditz with the animals as she’s about to be eaten by a giant bear.”

“Thanks, now I’m plagued by Logan as Little Red Riding Hood images.” Veronica turns away from him with her arms crossed. Wallace laughs.

“Hey, I don’t even need to know about you guys and your wacky sex antics or whatever cause… ewww.”

“Are you sure? ‘Cause the other day there was this awesome thing where I was Snow White and he was one of the Dwarves. Poor Logan’s knees might never be quite the same.”

“I hate you.”

“Love you too,” she says leaning back against the couch and drinking a large gulp of now warm Kool-Aid.

She falls asleep with her head resting against the couch; sometime that night Wallace wakes her up when his elbow bangs into her head.

The next day she goes to see him. Leo sighs and she’s pretty sure she hears a comment beneath his breath about how they always go for the bad boys. Logan lies staring at her from his bed, his head barely lifting up from the pillow of his cot.

She’s standing there, leaning in so her elbow pokes through the cell bars, her arms crossed over her chest. He finally waves a hand at her,

“Hi," he says shortly, pushing himself up to sit on the bed and look directly out at her.

“Hi, nice place. Not quite the Neptune Grande. Then again I’m pretty sure jail is cheaper, so, you know, you can steal less and live here. Maybe I should get you some curtains and a bean bag chair; then again you may not be here that long either.”

Logan merely shrugs and she was hoping for something else, an explanation, an apology, a ‘stop being such a fucking bitch, Veronica,’ not this casual acceptance.

“You could have called me,” she said, and even as the words slipped out she knew they were wrong. No, of course he couldn’t.

“No. I didn’t need you here. I didn’t need… anything.” He stands up and walks closer to her. His hand brushes against her elbow and Veronica hears Leo’s chair scratching across the floor as he moves closer to the open door separating the cells from the main office.

She really wants to turn and walk away from here right now, yet her feet are rooted. She’s stuck letting his fingers graze her forearm, imagining she can feel his breath on her skin.

“I’m seeing a lawyer again later today. Plea bargain blahblah,” he’s almost whispering, entirely too passive. Veronica wishes she heard anything other than apathy in his voice. She wants him to sound afraid. Just a bit. Instead he just looks small and sad.

Veronica nods, biting her lip while she searches her brain and tries to piece together whatever it is that’s vibrating through her body. Logan’s always been such a strange thing; she didn’t use to understand this. Then she watched him unravel, coming apart in her hands. Maybe it’s only fair; he picked at her and left her bruises when she was down and cracked.

“I’m going to write down my cell and give it to Leo and see that it gets put along with your stuff. Either way you’ll have it and…” she stops, shoving her hand into her pocket and digging around she counts out the change, “I’ve got 75 cents in change, which isn’t much, but it will get a couple of phone calls, okay? So you can find me.” Her voice is shaking a bit; her fingers distracted, toying with the edges of the quarters in her hand.

He just nods and Veronica has the desperate desire to reach through the bars and choke him in frustration. She turns, and as the door shuts behind her she hears him.

“Watch yourself, Veronica.”

But she knows that it’s far too late for warnings.

  


*****

  
Weevil gives him the cash for bus ticket, shaking his head.

“God, you are never going to stop owing me, are you, rich boy?” He smiles and sighs as Logan shoves the wadded-up cash into his pocket.

“Yeah I’ll pay you back, man. You know I will…” Logan slides his sunglasses on as he pushes himself off of Weevil’s bike and stands frozen before her apartment. He turns, realizing the mistake this is, but before he can tell Weevil to just take him to the bus station, Weevil’s blocks down the road, lost to Logan in the traffic.

She meets him at the door, pulling a hooded sweater over her head.

“So… I’m assuming the Echolls name still has influence somewhere?”

“Plea bargain, community service blahblah all that stuff.” Logan waves his hand; he hadn’t paid much attention to what his sentence was. After the phrase “no jail time” had slipped from the lips of the ADA, Logan had pretty much tuned everything else out. Mostly, he wanted to find her. He rehearsed telling her exactly how much his life sucks and how he hates her and how obviously she’s the worthless trash that he used to say she was. He wants to spill these lies out; hurt her the way he thinks she’s hurt him.

This dissolves when he sees her, when she bites her lip and when she holds her arms tighter to her chest the closer he gets to her. She tries to hide these defensive moves as merely straightening her sweater out, but Logan knows better.

"Wow, lucky you. So obviously you can’t go back to the Neptune Grande. What's next, Sundance?”

“Skipping out.” He hooks his thumb out toward the road and he looks desperately in her eyes for something. Even joy at being rid of him would do.

But her eyes have been reflections of sadness for a while now, and he aches thinking that he’s only hurting her more. Then again, that’s what they do now, isn’t it? He can love her and she can be with him only as long they take pieces of the other with them every time they touch. Strip the other down to spare parts, naked and bruised. Logan shakes the quarters in his pocket around, he’s got her cell number engraved in his memory and those seven digits mean far more than a phone call.

“I’m sorry, Logan.” She looks down at her shoes, her fingers playing with the hem of her sweater, hesitation in her voice. He gives her a kiss softly on the head.

“I’ll be in touch.” He walks away, and as he glances up at her balcony from the road, he can see her staring down at him. He doesn’t worry about Veronica; she’s the kind of woman that takes care of herself and everything around her. Like a bridge full of cracks that never breaks, she never crumbles.

Logan though, has plenty to worry about. This time his cash runs out somewhere in Utah. He sleeps in the hospital waiting room a few nights while picking enough money off the local innocent college kids to get further along. He sits on a dirty Greyhound bus station somewhere in a small town in Kansas. Across the rows from him is a woman, red hair falling down in her face as she flips through a worn grocery store romance novel; next to her, two kids fight over what channel to put the quarter in to watch the black and white TV. Next to him an older man sips coffee from a Styrofoam cup and he stares off into space.

“Mom,” one of the freckle-faced children whines, standing up in the bolted-down plastic seat, “the time ran out.” The mother sighs heavily and digs through her bag.

“I don’t have the money to feed a broken down television,” she says and the children both sink into their seats. Logan assumes disappointment such as this was and would always be a regular feature in these kids’ lives.

He digs deep into his pocket and pulls three quarters.

“Here man, this should get you guys a little time with Barney or whatever the fu—whatever it is you kids spaz over these days.” He shoves the money into a grubby hand and walks past looking for a bathroom and a place he can attempt to smoke up in semi-peace. Outside he lights up a pre-rolled blunt. There’s only woods behind the broken brick building that claims in faded letters to be a bus station and Logan decides to tempt fate by turning a dirty crate over and sitting there.

He’s about halfway through smoking, laying back and letting the stars blend together in a mess of light and clouds, when a door he hasn’t bothered to notice slams open against the wall.

“Motherfucker!” Logan shouts and the shock of the sound and his slightly dulled senses send him flying from the top of the crate and landing with a short thud on the ground, a cloud of dust going poof up around him.

The man behind the slam of the door just gives him a rough look.

“Well that’s what you get for sitting outside doing…” he stops and looks at Logan for a minute through large thick-rimmed glasses sniffing the air, “whatever it is you’ve been out here doing.” The man throws a large leaking bag of garbage into the blue overfilled dumpster several feet away from the building.

Logan finishes off his blunt and throws the last bit far into the woods.

“Great, just what we need, some snotty drug user starting a forest fire,” the man mutters taking another long hard look at Logan. “Don't I know you?”

“I don’t know man, why the fuck are you asking me that?” Logan sighs. The game of not being Aaron Echolls’s son has gotten harder in the past few years. It’s been a good year since Logan last turned up in the papers, or, at least, current pictures of Logan anyway. Every time the press gets bored and decides to run something on his dad, there are always pictures of Logan as a child sitting between his mother and father in one of those painfully insipid made-for-publicity family photos. Logan suspects that it is less recognizing the small blond bowl haircut and round faced child from those pictures than it was seeing something of his father in him.

This terrifies him, that deep down he’s not weak, but instead the kind of monster he used to battle when he was a boy. There’s the disgust that deep down, maybe he’s just like him. That no matter how many ties he cuts, no matter how far he runs, that he’ll always be Aaron Echolls’s son.

The man finally shrugs after eyeing Logan suspiciously for a moment; he slams the door behind him as he exits, leaving Logan to the darkness again. There’s some cold that he thinks is clinging to him, something he can’t shake off with drugs and fucking and it comes at him in these dark moments. He digs deep into his pockets and walks to the front of the building while looking on the ground for free range change to slide into the payphone.

  


*****

  
So Veronica Mars is a big fat liar. What else is new? Okay, well, no, it isn’t like she lies a lot or on a regular basis or whatever. But she can give him something, right? He can step away thinking she wishes she had looked for him, that she wants all the complications that he brings to her daily. That she wants to make him her reform project.

Veronica knows Logan is smarter than that. Her lie isn’t about that. He knows she can’t be sorry for making her life as easy as possible, for using denial to bury whatever she might have been able to feel for him.

She can’t pick up and fix everything that’s wrong with Logan, as much as she’d like to try. _She’s_ smarter than that, and yet she feels a pull to do something. Veronica wants to think that he can fix himself, that there’s something in there not determined to head full force toward annihilation. If telling him she’s sorry makes any difference, she’s fine with that. Little white lies hurt, but Logan’s grown and can take it.

She wakes up to the beeping of her cell phone alerting her to a message.

“Fuck.” She turns it on and curses her deep sleep patterns and possibly the fact that she still hasn’t managed to remember to make sure her phone isn’t on silent.

Logan’s voice comes out in starts and stops, his lips smacking between umms and ohs.

 _“Hey so yeah I managed to dig some change out and thought I’d… yeah, well, you’re hearing my voice, aren’t you? Leave it to you to give me your number and not answer the fucking phone. I’ll try not to take it personally. Anyway._

 _I just, you know, there’s a lot of stuff I’d like to talk to you about, maybe we should have spent less time fucking and done some deep soul searching shit, right? Cause, well, I wonder if…_

 _Man, Veronica, having a deep conversation with your cell phone is even harder than having a regular conversation with you. Do you know how hard that is? How hard it is to find words that I think won't cause you to hate me? How it’s… do you think this is what... Fuck, we’re doomed, aren’t we? Nah, you’re not doomed, you’re never doomed. I’m doomed; you’re just whatever the hell it is people like you are, treading water or something._

 _If I was less stoned I’d find a nice poetic bullshit metaphor to go with that, but you paid attention in lit class right? So I’m sure you’ll come up with something._

 _Shit man, I’ll talk to you later, also the bitch on your phone telling me shut the hell up is fucking evil. Can you change that? No, you won’t will you? Fuck.”_

Veronica sighs. She thinks about deleting it; her finger lingers over the seven. Instead she saves.

She wants to talk back to Logan, tell him that all anyone does is tread water. She’s not special or unique. You either tread or drown. She’ll never understand people like Logan; people that just take a gasp and throw themselves in. She remembers him, dead angry voice declaring the pointlessness of life and she wanted to slap him. To scream at how he was privileged to feel all that pain, to wallow and drown.

Veronica treads water because there are so many others around her that can’t seem to swim.

She thinks Logan tries to drown because no one ever told him they’d pull him out from beneath the current.

Hell yeah, Veronica paid attention in lit class, but where Veronica really learned it all was from her parents. She got her mother’s hair and eyes and small frame, that was all genetics and science made in a moment and forgotten in the years of bitterness to follow, but she’s her father’s daughter. The man that went on loving a woman intent on drowning herself and her family in alcohol and lies. She likes to think they loved each other once upon a time and they were more than guilt and obligation. She likes to believe love is more than mutual dysfunction, dressed up so people can make it through the day with one another.

Veronica likes to think that she’s too young to be this cynical and bitter. She lies and says that with love comes obligation and desire to mend all of someone’s wounds. A fairytale about how you can’t choose who you love, just how you love them.

It doesn’t really make her feel any better.

  


*****

  
On the bus Logan dozes, still dulled slightly from his evening smoke. He winds his way through the states again. He comes close to getting picked up for shoplifting outside of Chicago, but he’s fast. Well faster than the fine officers of the Chicago Police Department.

He steps off the bus a few hours before dawn; small signs dot the highway advertising Niagara Falls as cars pass him by, lights flashing him from behind as they go by. He spends his last five on a giant cheap coffee that has the consistency of old automotive oil and cheesecake covered in the most plastic cherries he’s ever had the pleasure of attempting to digest. In the rack next to the door are a series of lame cartoon post cards for lovers. Little bears, bunnies, and even frogs proclaim their sugar-coated love for one another in bright reds, pinks and purples. Logan looks around quickly before sliding a cartoon teddy bear one into his back pocket.

The water feels like ice as he fishes in the wishing fountain for change. Later at the post office he scrawls her address on it quickly and ponders what to say. In the end, after spending an hour standing at the small counter at the post office and going through a laundry list of things he wants to say, he simply draws a heart in the letter portion of the post card and drops it in the outgoing mailbox.

The sun’s starting to rise over the Falls and Logan stands among a mass of tourists looking out over the rushing water. He feels the compulsion to free fall from there. To just take a leap and leave everything behind. For a moment his feet itch to step up over the bars and when he closes his eyes he briefly imagines the wind rushing past him, inhaling the scent of the river as he dives.

Yet, he moves away from the edge. Maybe some other time, he’s got things to do. Later, he’ll want to write to her and tell her about staring down a free fall and walking away. However, the fact that he’s there seems like it ought to say enough.

  


*****

  
The pink of the post card stands in sharp relief to the yellow and white of the bills and junk mail spilling across the kitchen table. She pulls it delicately, reading it as she eats a quick lunch between work and her afternoon class.

She stares at the card. Little dancing cartoon bears, pink hearts and all the tackiness that one can expect from a gift shop from what feels like the other end of the universe. The back just features a postmark from almost a week ago, and a large blue heart scrawled in the message section. She flips it around in her hand, examining the worn edges with her fingertips. She thinks she can feel him in this, in this sort of random act that's so typical of Logan.

She folds the card up and keeps it in her back pocket all day, occasionally reaching back and reminding herself of it as she sits in class listening a lecturer drone on about the different types of child custody agreements.

She’s back home when she finally lets herself really look at the card again. She traces the line of the heart with her polish-chipped fingernail. Wallace is trying to inspect it over her shoulder.

Veronica remembers a day that feels like a fever dream in her memory when she demanded that he prove his love to her through carnival games, winning her cheap tokens of affection. In her head she briefly spins the story of the person she used to want to be, the kind of people her and Logan never will be. They stand on the pier and eat ice cream and she kisses him before they run off into the afternoon sunlight, and possibly there’s an annoying chick-rock soundtrack. It’s false, plastic, and pure invention and delusion. The afternoon sun turns to rain and Logan stands there with blood on his hands and his kiss tastes sour.

That’s when she knows it doesn’t matter. This is, if nothing else, a sign of life. Something real and tangible she can hold onto, so much better than the fairytale delusions she’s too smart to entertain. She knows better than to believe in the saving grace of a kiss and she knows better than to believe that there is even grace at all. She knows promises are broken and that love doesn’t conquer anything. Instead she takes this for what it is.

  
Wallace is trying to inspect it over her shoulder.

“What you got there?” he says.

‘Just… something,” she answers finally.  


**Author's Note:**

> A/N (1): I began writing this just after the first season finale. Thus, it's completely AU post-"Leave it to Beaver".  
> A/N (2): Thanks to G, C, and F for the beta work (seriously). Title from the R.E.M. song.  
> Disclaimer: All belong to Rob Thomas, UPN, SlaveRats Productions, and so on.


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